ISLAMABAD, April 5: The Higher Education Commission (HEC) on Wednesday announced that public sector universities would face cuts in or suspension of their annual grants, if they failed to follow quality criteria in appointments and promotions of faculty members.

“Those public sector universities that fail to follow HEC quality criteria in appointments and promotions of faculty members will face suspension of their development grants and reduction in their recurring grants,” said an official statement on Wednesday.

Similarly, it said, the universities that fail to follow the quality control criteria for PhD programmes would also be subject to the same action.

PhD degrees granted by the public and private sector universities would not be recognized unless they strictly conform to the minimum quality criteria laid down by the HEC.

The criteria includes prescribed course work at MPhil and PhD level, passing an international subject GRE examination with certain minimum specific percentile score, evaluation and recommendation of PhD thesis by at least two experts in technologically advanced countries and publication of at least one research paper in a reputed international journal.

In this regard, Dr Attaur Rehman, Chairman HEC, has already sent directive to vice chancellors of all the public sector universities, it said.

The HEC chairman, has clear cut instructions from Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, to cut funding of those universities, which violate the HEC quality criteria.

The Prime Minister has instructed the HEC to take concrete steps to ensure quality of education and link funding of institutions to such critically important governance issues, it said.

It’s worth mentioning here that, since the HEC has launched a number of PhD degree programmes, both indigenous and international, universities have started ambitious PhD programmes.

To secure more funding from the HEC, which had been able to increase its budget up to Rs11 billion, some of the universities have started certain PhD programmes, although they don’t have qualified faculty.

To check this trend, the HEC has worked out a comprehensive quality control mechanism, through which it wanted to make sure that quality research is done at the end.